“Two Minutes” created by Brett Simon, Alexandra Hitchinson, Siddi Vivek Damle and Kelly Van Bomel. Inspired by the sculpture of Ruth Asawa. Students devised an experience for walking close to a complex shape. The morphing conical sits in the center of a black knitted cylinder. Students were fascinated with the phenomenon that one can read the forms of the white materials through the black knitted. One can walk into the cylinder and experience the illuminated conical that changes color in two minute intervals.

When Annie Coggan, Pratt Institute’s Adjunct Professor of Interior Design sat down with the Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator’s Knitwear Director Kelly Puertas, they understood there was a mission: to create a knitted room. Annie’s vision? To transform a Pratt classroom with “soft construction” in the final week of spring classes.

Instigated by Anita Cooney, Dean of the School of Design at Pratt Institute, the two women worked together with Coggan’s “Soft Construction Lab” and 11 graduate design students from Pratt who participated in the project. The class’s objective was to design and fabricate a knitted room that utilized the BF+DA’s Shima Seiki knitting machines to create a room that was both habitable and sensuous.

“Hard Construction is thought of as drywall, wood, steel-traditional building materials. Soft Construction is a term I coined to illustrate that as interior designers we work in both worlds; the built environment is composed of both hard and soft. We at Pratt are lucky enough to invent in both worlds,” says Coggan.

Read the full article at the Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator.

Image: Annie Coggan